Chapter 2

Another 9 yards or so – [Maybe that's another filler, bring me the sandwich]

I’d been out of college for around three months, and still hadn’t got a job lined up. All that planning and hard work seemed like a waste. I’d managed to turn my life around [with the occasional bump in the road] but successfully. To be honest I wept when I found out that I’d only got a 2.1, but that’s what you get fore spending your year out fucked up on gear and acid [strange combination, but the Acid came first]. Maybe if I’d got a first the way I’d planed, but then things rarely comes off the way you think they will, they have a tendency to slide off slightly more than you can actually perceive at the time. Just that nudge bit off course is all you need over a long enough time line. These are the little kinks in your plans that form chains in cause and effect that go beyond where you can see of you life’s path.

I’d been clean for a long while back then, given the occasional slip from time to time. I couldn’t really tell you how long because I honestly couldn’t remember, but I’d slipped up badly in my gap year, that much I do remember as clearly as it’s possible to do when you’re banging up shit walking down the street just to see if you can do it. Even if I don’t quite recall everything I did at the time. Around then I was in a long term relationship, the kind that you keep trying to save because you think there’s something of value that doesn’t really exist, but then it’s like a log in a rough sea, it floats in a bad way that roles over when you’re trying to sleep.

This was one of the times that it really broke down forcing me to rent a room off someone I hadn’t seen for quite some time, and to be honest I wasn’t really all that keen on reacquainting myself with. The thing is that you create a picture of a person that you think doesn’t change over the years, but the brutal truth is that you idealise people you like and haven’t seen for some time. Conner was the old friend, and my memory of him was far from realistic, and most would say that he would be a bad influence on me, for a start he was still using intermittently, which wasn’t really good news. I bumped into him at a music festival in Brixton one sunny afternoon in some big park or other, both off our heads on Acid with a capital A. There I was wandering around off my face on when I stumbled into him. Quite literally, I actually fell onto him head over heels from a tent peg, and it turned out that he’d contracted HIV, but he was still healthy enough, and was living at the top of Brixton hill in a council flat. He’d split up with his boyfriend of some ten years or so about eight months previously, and had an empty room, and unsurprisingly for Conner was looking for a logger to share the drugs and utilities bill with.

Of course at this point my soon to be estranged love of my life was starting to really piss me off in a big way. All this first began with the very notion of me going to college, what with us doing fine and all [Education is apparently is a bad thing when you earn more money than your partner]. Of course the reason presented was more down to earth and far less esoteric, and revolved around our lack of insurance and the nature of the neighbourhood we lived in, to me a quite compelling reason to get a career. But when the logic of an empty flat is laid out before on half a bottle of Gin, somehow it seems to make sense to the other person. Then once I’d actually got into the place, settled down and made some friends, I started staying out all night getting hammered. Not the best remedy from insecurity, but a natural enough bid for freedom. The final straw came when I woke up in bed with twenty year old brunet, who looks wise was way out of said partner’s league. Apparently she’d taken a liking to me from the first day we met, which boosted my ego no end, and drove home the idea that freedom was a good thing [freedom being freedom from any binding relationship]. At that point in my life I was still pretty blind to that sort of thing, and so that kind of interaction happened because I was passably sober, and drunk enough to no pass up some hot chick’s advances, the notion of choice didn’t really come into it.
So that was my die cast and the game of snakes and ladders underway, and I needed a place to crash pretty soon, what with the bitter crap flying around what had once been home. I have to say that it was probably the biggest mistake in human history, how I thought I was going to stay clean around a guy who was always wrecked was a mystery I still haven’t solved, but for some reason I actually did think it was a viable possibility, you really can be persuaded of anything when you’re tripping.

Anyway, I ended up living with him in his remarkably spacious his Brixton Hill council flat that had enough room for a studio and a whole snaked up studio complete with tangled wires and vintage mixing desk and keys. In actual fact he had two spare rooms, so it should have [including the studio], so the place should have felt like a football field, but littered with broken instruments, empty bottles, and discarded porn [of both varieties] it didn’t turn out to be a haven from the worlds overwhelming madness. The studio was particularly chaotic and stuffed full of gear, all barely hanging together with missing sliders and broken buttons from a studio he and his ex-lover had set up and run into the ground as anything comparable to a viable business. Ironically the band that the studio had been set up to fund and nurture was actually still alive, gigging, and even turning a small profit [if you didn’t take into account the money spent on heroin and booze].

The band it’s self where far from ever being the next big thing, and where so much more last decades photocopy, but that didn’t stop young Chinese girls, and cute punk guys hanging around after each gig. This suited Connor down to the ground, and probably knowing him, was the reason he kept an obviously bad thing going. That and access to drugs that he didn’t feel he was working for. Strange logic to be sure, but logic that it seemed was shared by everyone else involved except the long suffering, slightly fat and hardworking manager, who had never quite caught on to the fact that they were all at heart quite happy to exist in an endless cycle of pep talks, bad gigs, good drugs, and guilt free sex.

The band themselves, named after a famous Bet Davis movie where she belittles he family each year, where somewhere between what Captain Beef heart might have considered a good idea, and the birth of punk in someone’s basement played out on badly tuned instruments, with a screeching accompanying vocalist who either didn’t know, or didn’t want find out what he was singing about.

Connor of plaid guitar, of sorts, a really mashed up fender that had probably once been someone’s idea of a dream, but was now the device through which he rendered his concrete wall of sound at the slim and usually disorientated audiences who would hand hang around in bars at night waiting for the main act to come on after these guys. They’d wait in the hope of something better, but somehow get fixated on the hypnotic cacophony that had in some small way granted them a small yet sizable community of followers.

The real problem [and there always is one] was that they really weren’t that original, the way they sounded was, but they just couldn’t write songs of their own, they could only distort one’s that and other people had written in quiet contemplation, and they had mangled in a back room in Brixton.

No one, except there ever hopeful manager couldn’t see them going anywhere. None of them could quite play well enough to make the sound they were after, and couldn’t recognise that the sound they made was actually quite unusual, a sound that they carried on despite hours of rehearsals, and months of planning.

Then it started happening. Little by little I ended up using again. At first it was a bad day, so I thought fuck it, I’ll get something just this once and we’ll share it. Then I started having more and more bad days, you can always make an excuse to use if you really want to. Not that I’m blaming anyone, it wasn’t like I didn’t enjoy myself, or that anyone forced me to do it. It was my choice entirely, and I kept on telling myself that it was only half a bag every few days, but it was enough to derail two years of hard work in six months.

My course was what’s known as a sandwich course, two years at college getting hammered in the student union bar, and trying to keep things in your head at the same time, a year in a job placement, and a final year with a dissertation which had to be based on a live project, usually provided by the people you’d worked for. Pretty soon it was time to find a placement, and I’d done nothing about it, I remembered a recruitment fair that I’d gone to about a month earlier where I’d talked to these two guys who worked for a games development company named New Star. I still had the envelope of crap they’d given me, so in desperation and with the clock ticking I wrote to them, not a bad letter either, how I was eager to work in a small company and was desperately keen to get into the games industry. Of course it was a load of crap; they were pretty much my last resort, bar one that didn’t bear thinking about. A small failing AI company who were looking for a general dog’s body that I’d considered simply because AI fascinated me, and still does.

Anyway miracles do actually happen, a few weeks before the deadline for getting a placement in order to complete my course I got a letter back from the New Star guys saying that they would really like to interview me, and they thought I might be a good fit for their company. When I got there, which took two trains and a bus, it turned out to be located in a vast rambling Victorian building, with plenty of atmosphere but no practicality when it came to running a modern state of the art business. Doubts started to creep in at this point, but it still looked like a fun place to work. The guy I would be working under was the products design director, a slim well-dressed man with an open collared shirt and chinos, kind of overstated smart casual that could just about pass for serious if necessary. He called me into his office and I took a chair.
“So, what makes you want to do your placement with New Star?” He said in the way interviewers always do, the clichéd question straight off the bat.

“Well, I’m interested in games”, I lied, the last time I’d been near a game was in a pub, “and New Star seems to be a small enough company that I could make a difference.” That answer took care of his probable next question; why not try to get a placement with SAGA, or one of the other larger companies. I’d researched New Star on the net and memorised there games output, which was actually seriously tragic given that most of the work they did was subcontracted from someone else. They hadn’t produced a serious product of their own in over a year, and the one that they had produced had pretty much tanked.
“Have you worked in assembler, on real time systems?” The real answer was no, but I couldn’t tell him that.

“We’ve done some work at college on the subject, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert.” I replied, hopping that it was enough to get me out of the hook; I mean how difficult could it actually be. I had a gift for programming, which was how I got on the course in the first place, so I wasn’t that worried about it. I was pretty sure that I could pick it up fast enough that I didn’t get fired or anything.
“Look,” I said taking a massive chance, “I saw what looks like a pretty good pub across the road. I paused and looked fun but earnest “do you fancy continuing this over there.”
He bought it, and after some lengthy discussions over a few pints of larger about game play and what was wrong with modern platform games, I was offered a placement. I took my bus and two trains back to Brixton, and had one final fling before embarking on what I knew would be a challenging job, given that I hardly knew a thing about writing games.

A week or so later a letter arrived in the mail with a contract and a start date, and a totally different address. I signed it and sent it back. Amazingly I managed to stay clean the whole time between then and actually starting work, probably because the commute to Kingston from Brixton was a complete bitch and getting fuck out of my scull was proving a real deterrent to going into lectures.
The new address for the company was a modern office complex in Wandsworth, just by the bridge, and off the high street. All shiny glass, including the table tops, which I was to learn latter was not without a purpose, other than simply looking good that is. It also turned out that the guy I was to be working with had changed, and it was a dramatic change at that. The bloke who interviewed me had moved on to a different department and some complete arse named James Tucker was now running the development group.

“So what are you here for?”

He said to me in a very confrontational manner, with more than a hint of contempt. I was quite sure that he’d been briefed on my arrival, and just didn’t really want to deal with the situation.

“I was given a placement with this company.”

I replied meekly, not quite knowing where I should go next with all this, his face just about summed it up. He’d already decided he had no use for me and was looking for a way out.

“Well if you can’t write games, you’re no use to me.” He says dismissively.

“Well, I’ve never actually written a game, but it doesn’t mean I can’t, I mean it’s just another kind of program and I’ve written a lot of them”

I responded in the hope that he might find it wining and plucky.

“Ok, there’s a bonus level that needs writing for something where working on at the moment, I’ll set you up with a computer and a translator box, and if you’ve produced something worthwhile in the next couple of weeks you can stay.” Through to the first round, I thought.

“Do I get a manual or anything?” I asked him, pretty pissed off with the situation. He looked at me as though to say ‘don’t push your luck’, but went and got a manual for the translator and the games system, and handed them to me with a grin that had all the hallmarks of ‘suck on that you prick’.

Writing games turned out to be pretty easy as it happened, especially on the SEGA machine which was an eight bit pile of crap. All the code was written in assembler, but the down side was that you had to write your own operating system before you could write a single line of useful code. It was a little like working with a mallet and chisel on the space shuttle, but in three or four days I pretty much had it figured out, with a little help from a few of the other guys who turned out to be quite supportive. They also held some pretty good parties, one of which I got so fucked up at I couldn’t remember a thing, and found myself wondering towards a station through this wooded lane in the middle of nowhere. That one was an experience though…

It went on like that for a couple of months, and I soon realised why the tables where made of glass. The premium was for people to finish work on a product as quickly as possible, most of the work being contracted from other companies. The glass table tops served as a great serf ace to cut up and snort cocaine and speed, which allowed people, including the effervescent Mr Tucker, to work for days on end without sleep. Not exactly a healthy practice and often people would go without food and wolf down large quantities of valium and aspirin in the belief that it would stave off any heart attacks that might be on the horizon. Tucker, for his part, was pushing everyone so hard that there was talk of people leaving on mass and migrating to Saga as a group [they’d shown interest in the past through head hunters].

What had seemed like a fun place to work turned out to be a complete nightmare run by a dictator who couldn’t even drive a car without having to show off how dangerous he was. That was in the first couple of weeks that I was there, maybe he wanted to size me up, but he told me that he needed me to come with him to pick up some computers. The guy drove like a nut job, completely out of his head on speed, down the motorway, zigzagging between cars to overtake them, all the time glancing at me to see if it was freaking me out. As much as I cared about my safety, I wasn’t going to let a little pimple get the better of me, so I just sat there and grinned back at him. At the end of the day I figured that he wasn’t going to kill himself to make a point, and I was pretty mashed up as it was anyway, so the powered to truly care had left my system as that white powder went up my nose.

In the concrete cavern between the low rise, long tower blocks where I was staying was computer repair shops in what was known as “The Walk”, an illusion to Lambeth Walk, which was probably more rundown now that when the slums had been cleared after the war. I’d occasionally go to the odd little shop for cables, plugs and other computer sundries such as disks due to the fact that it was down a flight of concrete steps. It turned out, in a the most ridiculous coincidence, that the owner knew one of the members of the board of the games company that I worked at, and I’d rather irresponsibly talked about what had been going on at work. Obviously it got back to the illustrious Mr Tucker, via the board, and he took a great dislike to me mentioning company business to outsiders, and I promptly got caned.

For a couple of weeks I just hung around the flat using up what cash I had left on smack, and feeling extremely sorry for myself, but then it occurred to me that I might still be able to get a job at the failing AI company. Again, they were yet another small company, a consultancy in fact, who’d made it big in the eighties with a prolog interpreter, also written in assembler by the guy who founded the company. He was rather a large man with a taste for atrocious jumpers, and bad show tunes. Unfortunately my job was in marketing, and involved going round various people who’d used their product in their systems, and writing it up into little fact sheets that could be given out at conferences. The up side of all this was that I could do most of my work from home, or on the road. Plus I got to go to Paris, and they supplied me with a modem and an email account on CIX, which was at the time a thriving bulletin board. This, you have to remember was before the internet really took off, and most people where scared of all the various protocols you needed to access things. CIX was a warm fuzzy little place where people could meat up, virtually of course, and discus their crap job, or how good their car was, or get answers to questions of both a technical and personal nature, i.e. I think my wife is sleeping with someone else what the fuck do I do about it. The answers to that one usually didn’t fall within legally sanctioned action.

The bad part of course was that I didn’t have to be in the office every day, which meant that with a wage coming in, and lots of spare time I could indulge my nasty habit of injecting narcotics into my veins. Shortly after Paris it got to the point where there was about three months left before I had to resume my studies and my final year at college, and I still hadn’t settled on a final year project. What I had done was become addicted to gear again. It’s amassing how quickly it can happen, and how easily you can fool you’re self into thinking that everything will work out just right.

The final year project was basically a massive document that outlined a proposed system for some client, preferably a real one, but more often than not, something that someone just made-up. I opted for the real client, a group of people looking at how best to use IT and emergent technologies in educating people about AIDS.

I knew I couldn’t keep up a habit and get through all that, so I rather stupidly patched things up with my ex, and moved back into the fifth circle of hell, giving up the skag cold turkey, and tok the bitching of a life time for the privilege. With some amount of strength I did actually manage to kick it with about a day or two to go before I had to go back, and coming back to college was hard. I found myself dragging my feet from one lecture to another, arms and legs made of led, no inspiration to actually care about anything at all. Alcohol generally eased the crappy feeling, but you just can’t stay pissed every single day for the whole 14 hours, for more than a month. My whole mind set was shot, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I’d spent the last six months bumming around, digging gear into my arm, and not much else in the way of work. The mad part was that I kept on getting paid, despite never going into the office, or producing any of the quality deliverables that I was supposed to. I did actually produce some things, otherwise I would have been fired, but it was nothing near what I was meant to do for them. The fact was the job was boring as hell, and I hated doing it. I was an engineer, not a fucking salesman.

Miraculously I managed to pass all my exams, in fact I got really good grades on just about everything, except for my final year project, which not to put too fine a point on it, stunk. I think I really only got a two one because my tutor, who was in charge of overseeing my project, and to whom I had confessed all my sins, basically felt sorry for me, and maybe a little surprised that I’d managed to bounce back.

After leaving college I really didn’t know what to do. I was back with the bitch from hell, and it didn’t seem like it was about to get any better. The plain fact was that I owed a huge amount of money to the bank, and so didn’t have very many options other than to ride it out until I found a job. That proved to be harder than I’d expected. I was thirty six when I graduated, and the only qualification I had was my degree. I applied to just about everyone I could think of, none of the recruitment consultancies where interested, at the time people where looking for experience, not jovial naivety. I finally ended up in a network management company writing code on UNIX and Windows 95 and NT. It was a great company to work for, run by this mad Australian with a shady past. I got the job on the basis of a windowing system I’d written using assembler to drive the graphic components, and hooking intro the mouse interrupt to move things around on screen. The rest was written in C, actually a fairly basic program when you took it apart, but it looked really cool and that was what counted. Mike, the VP seemed impressed by it, and Paul, who wasn’t really technically minded, but ran the company, well ran and owned I should say, seemed to like me, so I got a job as a junior programmer. I’d have to say that at first nobody really knew what they expected of me, and neither did I. I was initially hired to port the system onto a windows environment, but I ended up programming data acquisition probes on UNIX machines. Not that it bothered me. I’d never really used a UNIX machine before then, but I’m the kind of person who likes to be challenged, technically at least, so I adjusted pretty quickly to the task at hand and managed the job without much fuss.

I soon learned that Mike ran the development team like a gangster; he demanded total loyalty from all his employees, but if you screwed up and owned up to him, he’d have you’re back. He didn’t regard his team as part of the company, to him it was his company, and it made most of the revenue for Micro Com Inc. He wasn’t really someone that actually inspired people; he just stirred things up, made you want to work because he promised that you’d end up a millionaire.

I admired Paul immensely, he’d had a very chequered past. He began his business life in Sydney, fixing pinball machines and soon realised that there was more money in assembling pre-packaged computer components, and selling them on as complete computers. It gave him enough money to fly to England where he set up a number of ventures, none of which really took off. It wasn’t until he hit on the idea of UNIX machines running on PC hardware, i.e. LINUX that he met with any real success over here. But he knew that the real money wasn’t in hardware, it was in software, so he set about gathering together a team to design and build a product. Mathew came to him with very sketchy architecture for a network management product, and the team set about tinkering with prototypes. Nothing much came of it, that’s until Mike came along. Mike was a consultant who’d been working with Sun’s network management team, and came to one simple conclusion. Their product was too cluttered. The problem was that Sun’s product deluged the user with information, rendering him or her paralysed by the sheer scale of the problem. Pin pointing the root cause of a failure was an exhaustive task. So he built a product that de-duplicated alarms from the same source, and drilled down using route cause analysis to find the source of the network outage. It was of course an instant success. I was the seventh member of the team; just after we’d sold it into BT. Too say that we were making money hand over fist was an understatement. People just couldn’t get enough of it, and as I rose through the ranks my income rose with it until I was making more money than I’d ever done in my life, more than my father had ever made, more than any of my mum’s crappy boyfriends. Enough to buy a house for eighty four thousand pounds, which I latter sold of a quarter of a million, but that’s another story, for another time.

Paul regularly put his credit card behind the bar of one of the local pubs, and the company would descend on mass and take over the place. Those nights where wild, there was this one time this one time I had a pint of beer at every table. I was sitting with my feet up and I could reach my drink, so I ordered another one because the bar was closer. That’s what it was like, legendary, the kind of thing that you hear of from people who started up companies in California. The fact was we were total cowboys, we hacked solutions because we didn’t have the man power to make the product work properly. The one thing we did really well was throw parties. There was this big hotel by the harbour, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s where we had all our Christmas parties, until the year I left that is. I don’t know why, or if it was anything to do with me, but it really got out of hand that year. I ended up so drunk that I threw a glass of champagne at Paul, and his bit on the side, but he was so out of it on coke that I don’t think he even noticed. Stan, the development team leader threw up in an ashtray that looked a lot deeper from a long way off than it really was. Consequently he made a huge mess in the lobby, and the company was banned from using the hotel for any future functions.

The politics of the thing broke down into some pretty nasty back stabbing however. I had a hundred and seventy five thousand share options in the company, but the way Paul had re-structured things left Mike with fuck all compared to what he’d put into the venture, it effectively sliced his stock holding to a fraction of what it had been by folding the company into an umbrella corporation in which Paul owned most of the shares. Needless to say Mike was pretty pissed off, and took project Dudley (the joke is in the name, as in Oppenheimer’s Manhattan project) and started his own company. It’s something that I’ve come to regret a lot, and not just because of the money, but when Mike when I went with him. This of course meant relinquishing my rights to the share options, which ironically would have been worth millions, and I did this in exchange for a promise. Never trust a business man or a lawyer, and always get everything in writing, in triplicate.

When Clear Water Software launched I was the first employee, and I was promised that no one would ever be promoted above me in the company structure, except of course for Mike, which I didn’t have a problem with. He also promised that I’d get a piece of the company, a real piece of the company that would be worth millions. My contract with Micro Mark specified that I couldn’t work for anyone else for one month; well that’s what it came down to because no one who ever quits a job in the IT industry is made to work out there notice. You’re put on what’s known as gardening leave, which basically means that you stay at home doing nothing, and they still pay you for it.

Clear Water came from an idea he had in his basement, but that was bollocks, he’d had the idea months before and implemented it in a month on a Sun Microsystems machine, on UNIX. The problem he had was that none of it looked like anything. You can’t tell a venture capitalist that there are a million lines of code, or that it’s highly efficient and can process n number of transactions a second, they don’t understand, there stupid. They need to see an interface on a screen that moves and paints a pretty picture. That’s where I came in. Basically he knew that I could throw something together quickly that he could demonstrate his product with. By the time I actually began work for the company I had a basic prototype working that connected boxes with lines to represent a network. The biggest problem was that I’m not a mathematician, and network layouts where not my strong point. He already knew that, what he wanted from me was not a team leader, just someone who’d put together a working prototype front end, and that I did, amongst other things like building a team, and putting all the coding procedures in place. The problem with all of it was that I had no real power there. I was a research engineer, not senior or manager, just research engineer.

Eventually once we’d hired enough people, and trained them, the development team split into two factions, UNIX, and Windows. I developed a beautiful architecture for module loaders that would allow both us and the clients to develop new views by tapping into the data stream and filtering the messages they were interested in. It was simple, and cross platform, but because there was no coding standard put in place at that point like I’d asked for, and he didn’t understand it, Mike didn’t trust it and disposed of it like it was nothing, and there was nothing I could say to him that would make him change his mind. It was at that point that I decided to leave the company.

When I’d first joined Mike gave me this big speech about how no one would ever leave his company with arrows in their backs. Not like Micro Mark, but that’s basically what happened. I’d been promised shares in the company for my loyalty and hard work, but when it came down to it he tried to give me options like everyone else. I remember a conversation in the pub after work where he relayed a message from one of the founders who had promised me four shares. “These are not a gift, you have earned them, there you’re right.” Three year later at a meeting in a swanky hotel he completely denied it, but I saw the look in his eye, anyway, none of it mattered because my options unbeknown to him weren’t tied to my job at the company. That one really pissed him off, and he got his revenge in the end. Sad little man…

When I left Clearwater I when to work at Vision Tech UK Ltd an international consultancy with more ego than class, and a third rate management team who couldn’t recognise talent if it actually built a new system for them, which it did. They mainly did Java EJB back ends for blue chip companies, and training. They started me off with some mad project for the west midlands police force then moved me onto pre sales. I was pretty good at it, like one person said to me once, all you need to be is one page ahead in the manual, and it was true. I’d never done EJB in my life, but it wasn’t exactly complicated and I picked it up really quickly, but it was a really high pressured job. You’d get on a plane, or a train, wake up in some hotel room and it would take you a minute or two to remember where you were. I’d always been a heavy drinker, ever since I’d quit drugs, but I started going into overdrive. I had just gotten out of a thirteen year relationship, and was out nearly every night on the pull. The worst part of it was that I slept with my boss, three times, and then dumped her for another girl, one who was pregnant with my child. I loved her, but since things had gotten all tangled up it kind of came out of nowhere.

Jeff, the managing director hated me, mainly because I was right when he was wrong, plus I used to come into work in the cloths I’d been wearing the night before. Most of the time it would be something like a fur coat, leather trousers, boots and a tee shirt. Clients on the other hand loved me, God alone knows why, I was a cocky bastard, full of it and to make things worse I’d started using again. There’s only so many TVs you can buy, and I was earning more than I could spends, besides, if I’d carried on drinking at the rate I was I’d probably be dead by now. I used to come into work with a nail file kit full of syringes, all pre-loaded and ready to go. The mad thing was it actually made me a better employee. Getting through a boring course on EJB that you’ve delivered a thousand times before is a lot simpler when you’re stoned.

I think the real problem was that I hated the job, I even made a joke about creating a tee shirt with a picture of a gazelle and a lion with its mouth round the beast’s neck and the slogan ‘Wound not kill’. The idea being that a wounded animal can be given to the young to practice on. A consultancy is a lot like a parasitic organism, it drains money from the client and locks them into a contract they can’t escape from because you’re engineers are the only ones who know how the code works. You can charge them whatever you like once you’ve got your system in there up and running.

Anyway I decided that I could make a lot more money by going freelance, and working for myself, unfortunately the bitch I’d slept with was the one evaluating me for use as an outside contractor, needless to say she didn’t give me a good review, but I did get a lot of work from one of the companies they did work for. So much in fact I was making around one hundred and twenty thousand pounds a year. The problem was they always miss soled their courses, so I ended up trying to teach a bunch of managers who’d never seen a compiler in their lives, how to program large scale integration systems in Java J2EE. Of course none of them understood a word of it and I got the blame for delivering bad courses. At the time I had something like thirty thousand pounds in the bank, and I was feeling pretty confident about getting work elsewhere, so I told them where to shove it, the problem was that my habit had gotten a lot bigger by then and Jenny’s baby was due in three months, so we decided to quit. It wasn’t something we thought about, it just happened that one day our guy got busted and we couldn’t score. The first twelve hours weren’t that bad, we went to the supermarket and bought soup and booze, and anything else that was easy to eat, then we had a bath. I remember getting out of that bath and feeling like I’d just stepped into both scorching fire and freezing arctic snow. I could feel every bead of sweat on my body and I crawled into the bedroom, and fell onto the bed. Luckily I bought a boat load of those pills that stop you getting diarrhoea; the problem was keeping them down. For about three days I didn’t know where I was, I kept slipping in and out of horrible realities. I say realities because they weren’t like dreams, they were like being awake in a terrible universe and suddenly sliding into another one vague and undefined, but real and solid. Time didn’t seem to have any kind of meaning, for me it could have been three days or three years, it just felt like an eternity lying their trying to sleep. I have a vague memory of stumbling down the stairs and watching TV, holidays from hell. They really were from hell.

After three days we decided that we couldn’t do it by ourselves, and I stupidly suggested that Jenny should call her family and tell them what was happening, her family being her older brother Tim, who turned out to be a complete shit. Moths before when we’d gone down to visit him he couldn’t get enough of us, the guy used to sell speed for Christ sakes, and not just sell it but sell it to his self-harming girlfriend who’d sit in a bath injecting the stuff and cutting herself with a razor blade for hours on end. It wasn’t like he didn’t know about this either, he knew, he just liked the money, the same way he liked my money. When we were down there I bought him dinner every night and presents, and got him pissed. I spent hundreds of pounds and didn’t even think about it.

The one thing that Jenny asked him not to do was tell her parents, which was the first thing he did, after blaming it all on me and steeling hundreds of pounds from me because I was so out of it he didn’t think I’d notice. I noticed, I just didn’t care, the little shit cared more about cash than his own family, and frankly I feel sorry for him.

After he’d gone, my mum came down and looked after us for a while. She was pissed as hell with me, but unlike Tim she didn’t lecture me until I was well enough to walk and eat solid food. Anyway we managed to stay clean for about a month. I started looking for another job, and we took back all the unused needles to the local drugs project who told us that they couldn’t offer us any help because we were no longer using. I mean we asked them for help, just to be able to talk to someone on a regular basis, but they couldn’t give a crap. Within a few weeks of that we were using again, only this time I didn’t have a job to support us, all I had was the money in my bank account and the equity tied up in my house. We told ourselves that we were going to give up before the baby was born, but we didn’t, we just got worse and worse. Then Jenny started bleeding, and we rushed to the hospital. At this stage she was hardly using more than a quarter of a bag a day, but being middle class and stupid we told the doctor and they brought in social services. She had to have an emergency c section because she’d had a placental abruption. After he was born the just wheeled him passed me on a cart, they wouldn’t let me see him or touch him or anything. It was like I didn’t exist, I was just the scum to be pushed away. They put Jenny in a ward full of nursing mothers, without her baby who they decided was suffering from severe withdraws because he sensed once. They didn’t take a blood sample or anything, they just put him on so much morphine that he couldn’t stay awake to eat. Jenny got postpartum depression and even considered walking away and leaving our child. It was difficult for me; I was the one visiting him, changing his nappies, looking after him. Then social services intervened, a nasty balding little man who was immediately baffled by the fact that I owned a house and a car and furniture from heals, while he had a crappy old banger and wore cheap hideous cloths. He took an instant dislike to us, mainly because I wouldn’t bow down to him and let him treat me like I was some sort of social retard. I have a degree for Christ’s sakes, I mean my education was a lot harder to get than his, and he knew it, and hated it. He wrote a report stating that my life style was chaotic, which it wasn’t, I mean how do you become self-employed, and earn over a hundred thousand pounds a year when you have a chaotic life style. Unfortunately it soon became chaotic after they took our child off us. We had to drive thirty odd miles every two weeks to see him for an hour to some pseudo middle class ghetto where they’d place him in front of a television all day without any human interaction, in this was supposed to be good for him. So we’d wander round a shopping mall and go home and take more drugs because the experience was so profoundly disturbing. We barely slept by that point and we’d discovered crack. People say that heroine is better than sex, well snowballing, hitting up crack with gear is even better than that. Sleep deprivation, and cocaine have a weird effect on the human psyche. After a while you start seeing and hearing things that aren’t really there. Jenny spent most of her time in the nursery painting it and hitting up, and always there was the sound of babies crying and people arguing. I still don’t know if any of that was real. The one thing I know wasn’t real was evil bunny. He was a soft toy we’d bought for our un born child, along with millions of other soft toys who all had a life of their own, and spoke to each other and moved. We made up games and stories, anything to stop our selves having to think about our situation. Evil bunny was evil because he’d killed a farmer who’d murdered all his family, his paws where stained with blood, and all the other toys disliked him, but we didn’t. We talked to him about ways in which we might dispose of our social worker. He had some pretty good ideas; a cellular bomb was one of the best.

It was around this time that we started to run out of money, I hadn’t found any work and Jenny had stopped going in because she’d been pregnant so got the sack. Wonderful woman MP’s, they've really got you re back. The bitch is now on the front bench making policy. That actually scares me to death.